What can user do with VIEW SERVER STATE permissions?

Question

In SQL Server 2008 there is a permissions VIEW SERVER STATE. What rights this permission give to user? What SQL Server mean by SERVER STATE?

Solution

Read Dynamic Management Views and Functions

Dynamic management views and functions return server state information that can be used to monitor the health of a server instance, diagnose problems, and tune performance.

There are two types of dynamic management views and functions:

• Server-scoped dynamic management views and functions. These require VIEW SERVER STATE permission on the server.
• Database-scoped dynamic management views and functions. These require VIEW DATABASE STATE permission on the database.

Comments

[jmoreno]

I would mention that there are security implications for allowing the use of DMV's and DMF's -- in particular, they allow looking at queries and query parameters, which can contain confidential info. Not a problem if there is only one database on the server and the user can already look at everything in the DB. But how often is that the case?